Nala Ray is the most well known. The pastor’s daughter grossed $9m in earnings from her sex work on OnlyFans but a growing relationship with a Christian helped her to rethink her life after an encounter with God: “[I thought] what’s the point of all this money, when I don’t have feelings… I don’t have kids, I have nothing but materialistic things that are cold and sitting in my closet?” she told Michael Knowles in an online interview. “I was sobbing, I was looking at my fireplace, I grabbed the Bible… God decided to truly meet me where I was. And it’s not like he was far from me, it’s that I was far from Him.
“I was like, ‘God, I need an answer now, I truly need an answer now’ and he gave me an answer… ‘all you ever needed was Me’.”
In the interview, she described a joyless life as an OnlyFans worker despite the money – numb to emotion and experiencing poor relationships. “I was making millions and I didn’t feel any different,” she said. “I could buy anything that I wanted and I still felt the exact same… all that numbness was emptiness, like complete and total emptiness.”
She says that has all changed since her conversion. She posted a video of her baptism on Instagram on 26th December and has since married, deleted her OnlyFans account and talks often of the change in her life.
Undoubtedly, seeing a video of your beloved spouse having sex with another person is one of the most difficult things to deal with. The images and thoughts they evoke can sometimes be so powerful that they jeopardize the relationship. But what if not just one tape, but 250 such tapes, are still actively being viewed on the internet and on paid television channels all over the world? And what if new and previously uncut footage is still being released? This is the case of Richard De La Mora, a young pastor who met and fell in love with a beautiful woman named Brittni while serving in his youth ministry and wished to marry her. Little did he know that this woman had a sexual history that would make Jezebel shudder. Brittni had recently decided to leave the porn industry and start a new life; however, she had produced approximately 200 pornographic films in addition to working as an escort and stripper.
Despite this, Richard married Brittni, knowing that his life would be severely impacted if this woman became his wife, and they now have two lovely children and are both actively involved in assisting women who want to leave the porn industry.
So, how did Richard do it? Where did he get the strength and courage to forgive and forget his wife’s heartbreaking sexual history, and how does he sleep at night knowing that anyone who so desires can see the most intimate part of the woman he calls his wife with the click of a button? In the video interview below, Richard describes his journey to forgiveness and total acceptance.
Richard speaks about how he overcame Brittni’s sexual past
Richard and Brittni talk about how couples could overcome the high body count of their partners and learn to grow in love with one another. The key is prayer.
Brittni De La Mora, a Christian ex-porn star, has advised Kanye West not to pursue the self-destructive venture of producing adult pornography content. Kanye was previously thought to have embraced the Christian faith. She says that going that route would be like a dog returning to its vomit, alluding to a version of the Bible in which Jesus warns that once a person has decided to abandon their old sinful lives and follow him, anyone who returns to their old ways will not be fit for God’s kingdom.
At the height of her career, Brittni De La Mora was one of the most famous porn stars in the world, but today she is a wife, mother, pastor, evangelist, author, and passionate advocate for women involved in the sex industry. She spoke about how she got into the sex industry and how this was one of the darkest days of despair, leading her to survive by way of drugs, alcohol, and ultimately, failed attempts at suicide
She told Candace Owens that Jesus saved her on her way to a porn shoot by encouraging her to read the Bible, and one particular bible verse finally made her quit the porn industry.
She also points to the fact that former fans tried to pull her down and her newfound life in God by sending her porn videos to her husband, Richard De La Mora when they first started dating. But by the grace of God, her husband was able to overcome it,e and talks about how he came to overcome her sexual past
Brittni and her husband encourage couples to learn to overcome their partner’s sexual past and move on.
“My Heart Is Open”: Actor Russell Brand Unveils Interest In Christianity
“My heart is open,” actor and comedian Russell Brand said in a recent X (formerly Twitter) video unveiling his interest in Christianity.
Brand is known for his roles in many Hollywood movies, including “Despicable Me” and “Bedtime Stories,” to name a few.
However, several of his past films contained immoral and explicit content. The actor also struggled with drug addiction and promiscuity.
In a Jan. 21 video entitled “Why I Wear a Cross,” Brand discusses his newfound interest in Christianity and the crucifix. He opens the video by chanting in Latin.
“The reason I wear a cross is because Christianity, and in particular the figure of Christ, seems to me to be inevitably becoming more important as I become more familiar with suffering, purpose, self, and not self,” Brand begins.
“I’m reading the Bible a lot more and as I’ve told you before, I’m reading Rick Warren’s “Purpose-Driven Life.”
“When I grew up, Christianity seemed like it was either really irrelevant and old-fashioned and sort of dusty and sort of incense,” Brand continues, chanting “Anno Domini.”
Brand then explains what he sees as Christians trying to “modernize” the religion. Either way, he thought, “Both of those roots seem like I don’t know if there’s anything for me.”
However, as he ages, Brand sees that he “needs a personal relationship with God.”
“It occurred to me that if instead of always talking to myself inwardly, I could replace one of those voices with an indwelling. God says in Galatians that it is our job to die so that, as Christ died on the cross, he might be reborn in us. I’m very interested to hear what you think because, for me, my heart is open.”
Catholics Respond To Russell Brand
Several Catholics responded to Brand’s request for suggestions on X (Formerly Twitter).
One Catholic convert suggested reading the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
“Please read Saint Thomas Aquinas. It will make a lot of sense to you,” Matthew Marsden wrote. “When I realized you could prove that there is a God by reason, it changed my life.”
Another user cited Saint Augustine’s “Confessions.”
“In his ‘Confessions,’ Saint Augustine wrote, ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,’ the X user suggested.
“You are an incredibly intelligent man, like Augustine, and appear to share the same restlessness he experienced, which can only be healed by embracing the cross.”
Others suggested watching Catholic sermons and praying the rosary
Pray for Russell Brand as he embarks on his journey to the fullness of truth!
1. Winning too much: Goldsmith notes that the hypercompetitive need to best others “underlies nearly every other behavioral problem.”
2. Adding too much value: This happens when you can’t stop yourself from tinkering with your colleagues’ or subordinates’ already viable ideas. “It is extremely difficult,” Goldsmith observes, “for successful people to listen to other people tell them something that they already know without communicating somehow that (a) ‘we already knew that’ and (b) ‘we know a better way.'” The fallacy of this sort of behavior is that, while it may slightly improve an idea, it drastically reduces the other person’s commitment to it.
3. Passing judgment: “It’s not appropriate to pass judgment when we specifically ask people to voice their opinions, even if you ask a question and agree with the answer.” Goldsmith recommends “hiring” a friend to bill you $10 for each episode of needless judgment.
4. Making destructive comments: We are all tempted to be snarky or even mean from time to time. But when we feel the urge to criticize, we should realize that gratuitous negative comments can harm our working relationships.” The question is not, ‘Is it true?’ but rather, ‘Is it worth it?'” This is another habit Goldsmith recommends breaking via monetary fines.
5. Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However.” Almost all of us do this, and most of us are totally unaware of it. But Goldsmith says if you watch out for it, “you’ll see how people inflict these words on others to gain or consolidate power. You’ll also see how intensely people resent it, consciously or not, and how it stifles rather than opens up discussion.” This is another habit that may take fines to break.
6. Telling the world how smart we are: “This is another variation on our need to win.”
7. Speaking when angry: See number four.
8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: Goldsmith calls this “pure, unadulterated negativity under the guise of being helpful.”
9. Withholding information: This one is all about power. Goldsmith focuses on ways even the best-intentioned people do this all the time. “We do this when we are too busy to get back to someone with valuable information. We do this when we forget to include someone in our discussions or meetings. We do this when we delegate a task to our subordinates but don’t take the time to show them exactly how we want the task done.”
10. Failing to give recognition: “This is a sibling of withholding information.”
11. Claiming credit we don’t deserve: To catch ourselves doing this, Goldsmith recommends listing all the times we mentally congratulate ourselves in a given day and then reviewing the list to see if we really deserved all the credit we gave ourselves.
12. Making excuses: We do this both bluntly (by blaming our failings on the traffic, or the secretary, or something else outside ourselves) and subtly (with self-deprecating comments about our inherent tendency to be late, or to procrastinate, or to lose our temper, that sends the message, “That’s just the way I am”).
13. Clinging to the past: “Understanding the past is perfectly admissible if your issue is accepting the past. But if your issue is changing the future, understanding will not take you there.” Goldsmith notes that quite often we dwell on the past because it allows us to blame others for things that have gone wrong in our lives.
14. Playing favorites: This behavior creates suck-ups; rewarding suck-ups creates hollow leaders.
15. Refusing to express regret: “When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ you turn people into your allies, even your partners.” The first thing Goldsmith teaches his clients is “to apologize—face-to-face—to every coworker who has agreed to help them get better.”
16. Not listening: This behavior says, “I don’t care about you,” “I don’t understand you,” “You’re wrong,” “You’re stupid,” and “You’re wasting my time.”
17. Failing to express gratitude: “Gratitude is not a limited resource, nor is it costly. It is abundant as air. We breathe it in but forget to exhale.” Goldsmith advises breaking the habit of failing to say thank you by saying it to as many people as we can, over and over again.
18. Punishing the messenger: This habit is a nasty hybrid of 10, 11, 19, 4, 16, 17, with a strong dose of anger added in.
19. Passing the buck: “This is the behavioral flaw by which we judge our leaders—as important a negative attribute as positive qualities such as brainpower, courage, and resourcefulness.”
20. An excessive need to be “me”: Making a “virtue of our flaws” because they express who we are amounts to misplaced loyalty and can be “one of the toughest obstacles to making positive long-term change in our behavior.”
Goldsmith even includes a bonus bad habit: goal obsession, or getting so caught up in our drive to achieve that we lose track of why we are working so hard and what really matters in life.
The beauty of Goldsmith’s approach lies not just in the simplicity of his insights, but also in the clarity of his advice. Because it is our behavior that holds us back, he argues, we can change our future by changing how we act. The key to a better future likewise comes from learning to listen to what others have to say about our behavior. We learn best if the lessons others have for us come not in the form of “feedback,” which focuses on an irrecoverable past, centers on judgment, and makes us defensive, but in the form of “feed forward,” which is constructively centered on the future and takes the form of helpful advice about things we have the power to change.
Goldsmith’s message is, ultimately, a very straightforward one: The secret to corporate success is that one must be able to work well with others. If this sounds awfully much like kindergarten criticism, that’s because it is. But it’s also the stuff of top-level corporate coaching, and for good reason.
Reality television shows centered on professional competitions dramatize the essential truth of Goldsmith’s argument. Consider Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” or any of the other career-oriented shows about getting ahead, such as Bravo’s “Top Chef,” “Project Runway,” and “Top Design.” More often than not, these shows demonstrate that what really keeps talented people from moving forward is a fundamental inability to play or work well. Because the gifted people on these shows are so competitive, they won’t cooperate with their coworkers. Because they are so full of themselves, they don’t listen to their clients. Because they are reluctant to give credit to others and tend to take undue credit for themselves, they alienate potential allies and partners. On episode after episode of show after show, we see otherwise brilliant, innovative, capable professionals failing miserably because they don’t listen, they won’t share, they fail to say thank you, and they refuse to say they are sorry.
That’s why these shows, so appealing to individual egos in their promise of professional advancement, devote so much time to challenges that center on teamwork. In framing competition around collaborative ventures, they highlight how self-defeating the need to win can be.
Goldsmith’s insights need hardly be confined to the workplace. They work at home, as he notes, and can do wonders for family harmony. After all, the reason Goldsmith can make a living teaching top executives how not to interrupt and how to say thank you is that so many people never learn these skills at home as children. If they had, Goldsmith would be out of business. As it stands, Goldsmith has written a leadership manual that could double as a guide to good parenting and marital peace.
“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”
In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished — but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.” Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, “Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?”
As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man’s Search for Meaning as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book’s ethos — its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self — seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. “To the European,” Frankl wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.'”
According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high — as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word “happiness” in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. “It is the very pursuit of happiness,” Frankl knew, “that thwarts happiness.”
***
This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables — like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children — over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a “giver.”
“Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,” the authors write.
How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.
Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.
Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior — being, as mentioned, a “taker” rather than a “giver.” The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire — like hunger — you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.
“Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others,” explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need,” the researchers write.
What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life “you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.” For instance, having more meaning in one’s life was associated with doing activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.
“Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy,” Baumeister told me in an interview.
Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment — which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. “Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life,” the researchers write. “Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future.” That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.
Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they are feeling bad than those who do not have a clearly defined purpose. “If there is meaning in life at all,” Frankl wrote, “then there must be meaning in suffering.”
***
Which brings us back to Frankl’s life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.
In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl’s talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. “I hope you don’t object,” Freud wrote the teenager.
While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did he establish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers — a precursor to his work in the camps — but he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna’s Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.
That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field.
As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, “Should I leave my parents behind?… Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?” Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a “hint from heaven.”
When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained a fragment of one of the Ten Commandments—the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.
The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: “Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is.”
Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves — by devoting our lives to “giving” rather than “taking” — we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness
At a fundraising event in California, Crissy Outlaw stands at a pulpit wearing a glamorous billowing black mini with a pink flower carefully lodged in her dark hair.
The all-American 41-year-old beauty begins her sermon simply with: ‘Hi, my name is Crissy and I used to be a porn star.’
She opens with this same line to the other congregations she visits, narrating the chilling times she was abused time and time again from the age of four, the failed relationships that left her ‘wanting to be dead’ and how she gave up her career as one of the biggest names in the porn industry to become a prolific Christian preacher.
‘I can’t believe I ever went into the porn industry,’ Crissy told DailyMail.com.
‘And I never wanted to be a preacher but it happened because I felt called to let people know why I left the industry.’
Crissy grew up in Jacksonville, Florida in a lower-class, conservative and chaotic home. Her parents were divorced and she primarily lived with her father, who was adamant about sexual purity and often launched into diatribes about her maintaining her virginity until she got married.
While Crissy – whose mother couldn’t be as close as she wished during her childhood after a messy divorce with her father – believed in God, she says she was ‘confused’ by this advice on staying away from sex because for most of her childhood she was sexually abused by a predatory neighbor who touched her inappropriately – a secret she kept from her father.
‘I couldn’t understand why I was being molested so many times; it was confusing to me,’ she said. ‘Why is it so easy for people to touch my body?
‘I couldn’t make sense of it as a child. I thought it must be something about me that’s making it happen.
‘I didn’t tell my father because I couldn’t have a relationship with him, since he’s hard to get along with.’
The brunette beauty gave up her career, during which she earned more than $15,000 a month, because she believed she had received a sign from God to quit the industry. She told DailyMail.com: ‘This mistake is out there forever but I’ve come to peace with myself and who God has made me to be’. Crissy is pictured on the left at the LAX Radisson Hotel in Los Angeles, California, during the height of her career and on the right sharing her story at the Mars Hill church in 2012, six years after she had quit porn
The Florida native, pictured here at seven years old, cites her abuse as a child – a secret she kept hidden for years – as the reason she suffered from low self-esteem and subsequently entered porn
She moved in with her mother when she was 13 years old but rebelled against the rules her father had set. A defiant Crissy lost her virginity at 17 and that same year, she became pregnant. Steadfast in the belief she would marry the man she thought was the love of her life, she decided to keep the baby. Just weeks after her decision, though, her boyfriend dumped her and she felt forced to have an abortion in her first trimester.
‘I was fully awake and aware of everything going on during the abortion and my heart was shattered while the life was literally being sucked out of me,’ Crissy recalls.
‘It was awful….my school knew about my abortion and I lost all my friends.
‘That was one of the most traumatic things that happened.’
The abortion led Crissy into a deep depression and for most of her life she looked to relationships to help her out of her mental illness and to fill a void she says her father had left.
‘I felt like I needed to be in a relationship or to be a mother to be worthy of love,’ she said.
‘I look to men to make me feel like I was beautiful, to make me feel protected and to give a sense of stability in my life, things my dad never did.’
Although she heralded romantic relationships as the ideal, Crissy suffered humiliating and degrading treatment at the hands of the men she dated because they often wanted to incorporate pornography in their sex lives.
Among the horror stories was a relationship she had with a pornography addict who raped her multiple times. She says she had to have many abortions because there were times when he would rape her while she was not on birth control.
These failed relationships as well as the memories of her abuse drove her down a path of low self-esteem and she decided to have breast augmentation surgery, believing she could finally measure up to the women her ex-boyfriends watched on screen.
Crissy, pictured here in 2006, says she never ‘felt good enough’ for her boyfriends because they often wanted to incorporate pornography in their sex lives. In her early twenties, she decided to have breast augmentation surgery so she could resemble the women her boyfriends lusted after. She said: ‘I felt worthless to the point that I chose porn and I said, one day I’m going to be one of the girls you watch on screen’
‘I never felt good enough for the men I dated,’ she said. ‘I didn’t feel beautiful because they looked at porn during sex with me. I thought, am I not good enough for you that you can’t only look at me?
‘I felt worthless to the point that I chose porn and I said, “One day I’m going to be one of the girls you watch on screen.”’
She made the bold decision after she posted a picture of herself on a website that was calling for traditional models. Although she rejected countless offers to model in the nude, photographers flooded her email inbox, complimenting her looks and promising her a successful porn career.
Soon, wooed by the acceptance porn seemed to offer, 23-year-old Crissy gave in and decided to become a porn star.
But the nerves she felt on her first day on set proved she wasn’t fully ready for what her new career choice entailed.
Speaking of the first shoot on a Florida beach, she said: ‘I was so scared, I wasn’t really in my element.
‘Even in the picture, you can tell I was so disconnected.
‘When the photographer told me to take my clothes off, my hands and legs were shaking and I was thinking, what am I doing?
‘I was nervous but I checked out, like I did when I was sexually abused.
‘The sense of danger was exciting to me because I wanted to end up dead, that was just how messed up I was.’
Crissy – who performed in over 50 adult movies between 2001 and 2006 and eventually earned $1000 dollars a scene – became more comfortable and quickly became one of the most popular porn stars and entrepreneurs. Towards the end of her six-year career she founded her own website, modelled for notable magazines including Playboy and earned more than $15,000 a month.
The reality of this seductive world was far from its glossy exterior however. Crissy fell to the floor one fateful night in 2006 in her bedroom in California and cried out to God because she felt ‘broken’ by her relationships and didn’t know who else to turn to.
‘I fell to the ground and I said “God, if you’re real, I need you to tell me. I need a sign because everything I know about love isn’t right. And I need to feel you in my life because I haven’t felt you since I was 11 years old,” and I stayed on the floor,’ Crissy said.
Crissy became a porn star in 2000 because the ‘sense of danger was exciting’, but six years into her career, she fell to the ground in her bedroom in California and prayed because she felt ‘messed up’ by her relationships and wanted to feel God. The next day, someone she’d just met asked her if she wanted to dedicate her life to Jesus Christ. Seeing that encounter as the sign she needed from God, Crissy quit porn that day. She is pictured here in September 2013, sharing this part of her story at the First Baptist Church in Orange Park, Florida
After her divine encounter, Crissy began to share her story at various churches. She also traveled with members of the xxxchurch, which has the biggest anti-porn website in the world, to preach the gospel at porn conventions while wearing a t-shirt labelled ‘Jesus loves Porn Stars’
The next day, the then-31-year-old visited her boyfriend, an actor on a movie set in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During a break in filming, she was hanging out with him, a couple of his friends and film crew members. One of his friends began passing a photo of his topless wife around the circle the group had formed while making lewd comments. Crissy was embarrassed and angry, but a man who worked on the film set, Chris, decided not to look at the picture and rather told the group he would never show any pictures of his wife to anyone.
Crissy was surprised by his response because it wasn’t typically what she heard from the men she dated.
While the rest of the team got back to filming, she continued speaking with Chris. During the conversation he asked her what she did for a living; she eventually admitted she was in porn. He then told her that her boyfriend had already told everyone about her career and had passed around nude pictures of her to other people on the set.
‘I put my head down because I was so ashamed,’ Crissy says.
But Chris asked her a question that reminded her of a prayer request she had made the night before: ‘Do you know Jesus?’
Crissy took that as the divine sign she’d asked for and was relieved God had answered her prayer. The pair prayed together and her life changed in that moment.
‘I started crying when he asked me if I wanted to rededicate my life,’ she said.
‘I said yes. [After that], I didn’t do any more shoots and stopped accepting any income from pornography.’
The born-again Christian went through therapy to help her heal from her abuse and time in the porn industry. In May 2013, she married her husband Lawton Outlaw, a youth pastor at the time
When Crissy gives her speeches, she typically begins with: ‘Hi, my name is Crissy and I used to be a porn star’. The 41-year-old has also become somewhat of a guru-in-chief on her YouTube channel, where she warns her followers to avoid repeating her mistakes’.
She ditched her boyfriend and visited therapists to help her heal from her time in pornography. Using the conversation as a springboard for change, she began attending a local church and decided to avoid relationships for a year in order to heal. Soon after her break, she met her husband-to-be, Lawton Outlaw – a youth pastor at the time.
The pair married in May 2013 and Crissy now works part-time in retail in Houston, Texas. She travels around the country to tell others to avoid repeating her’mistakes’ and has worked with members of the xxxchurch, which has the biggest anti-porn website in the world, who travel to porn conventions to preach the gospel while wearing t-shirts labelled, ‘Jesus loves Porn Stars’.
‘I made tons of mistakes but entering porn was one of the biggest ones,’ she said.
‘This mistake is out there forever but I’ve come to peace with myself and who God has made me to be.’
THE PORN STAR REBORN: ‘WORLD’S HOTTEST PORN STAR’ HAS LIGHT BULB MOMENT TO TURN TO GOD AFTER BATTLING COCAINE, DEPRESSION AND SUICIDAL THOUGHTS
Brittni de la Mora considers entering pornography a ‘mistake’ too. This 30-year-old was once named one of Maxim’s hottest porn stars and Howard Stern’s smartest porn star – a title she earned after taking one of the radio icon’s trivia tests he gave to the porn stars he interviewed.
Yet underneath the glamour of her porn-stardom, she battled a cocaine addiction, depression and an eating disorder, which all became so serious that she searched elsewhere for acceptance: the church.
‘I was really depressed…the drugs are the only thing that helped me get through the day because they just made me feel like I wasn’t in this little pit of depression,’ Brittni told DailyMail.com.
‘It gave me a little bit of energy and a false sense of happiness.
‘But after seven years, I started to cry and I apologized to God. I didn’t understand that this is what I’d been doing all these years.
But the road to religion was a long and arduous one.
Brittni says her childhood, riddled with betrayal, neglect, and instability, made her feel unwanted. A part of her early life still etched in her memory were the hurtful words she says her parents would often say to her.
‘My parents took a lot of their hurt and pain out on me,’ she said.
‘From a very young age, they would say things to me like “I hate you” and “I wish you were never here” and other very hurtful things.
‘I never felt accepted by my family and when you don’t heal from something, you carry that in your soul.’
Brittni was first introduced to the sex industry at 16 years old, when she worked as a stripper in her hometown, Santa Barbara, California. While partying at a strip club in Mexico, she took to the stage so she would be ‘affirmed’ by her male audience.
‘That was when I realized that if I’m going to be naked and in the presence of men, then they are going to pay me, and they are going to affirm me.
‘They want to be around me and that was something I had never felt as a child. I had never felt like I was wanted and so that was that seed that was planted that night.’
She stripped for two years, until a porn director asked her to try ‘romantic films’. Brittni, who was a broadcast journalism student at the University of Santa Barbara and knew exactly what he was asking her to do, agreed because she wanted a more risqué career path and yearned for financial freedom from her parents, with whom she had a distant relationship.
Brittni (pictured right at six years old) says she felt neglected during her childhood. A part of her early life still remains in her memory: the hurtful words she says her parents would often say to her. The California native recalled: ‘I never felt accepted by my family. When you don’t heal from something, you carry that in your soul’
Brittni, pictured on the right with her siblings in their Santa Barbara home, yearned for financial freedom from her parents at an early age so at 16 years old she decided to become a stripper because she enjoyed the attention strippers received from men
Her first porn scene was at a mansion in Los Angeles, California. Hair and makeup ready, the then-18-year-old was not camera shy but was nervous about one thing: sex positions.
She had never watched pornography so was confused as the director yelled out positions she’d never heard of. Despite her nerves, the novice won them over.
‘They were telling me I was going to be such a big star and that everyone is going to love me.
‘For me hearing all of this, I thought, this is awesome. People are going to love me and I’m going to be a star.’
Brittni quickly became a professional and was shooting at least three scenes a day but a month into her ‘stardom’, she was diagnosed with gonorrhea.
She was even more humiliated after her agent told her ‘just a shot in the butt’ and antibiotics would relieve her.
The event that would trigger Brittni’s addiction occurred just a few days after her diagnosis. Having suffered from an eating disorder in her teens, she was upset when a director she was working with called her ‘fat’ on set.
‘I had gotten out of the hospital not long before that,’ Brittni said. ‘When I was a senior in high school I had anorexia and so that was really hard for me to hear.’
At 5ft 1inches and 105 lbs, Brittni sported a thin frame – and weighed significantly less than the average woman her height. Still, wounded by the director’s comments, she indulged in cocaine after listening to a friend’s advice on weight loss.
‘I was telling myself if I am in the tripple digits…it means I am fat,’ Brittni said.
‘I started looking for ways to lose weight and there was a model I was living with who suggested cocaine and so that’s when my addiction started.
‘Over the next seven years, it just got worse.’
During those years, Brittni would also take painkillers such as oxycodone and Vicodin when she suffered from withdrawal symptoms. Under the alias Jenna Presley, she still put on a brave face at her job and was quickly growing in popularity. Often, fans would approach her to enquire if they’d seen her ‘somewhere’, as though oblivious to who she was.
At 21 years old, Brittni garnered $3 million after appearing in 275 films but amid the glamor and fame that porn seemed to offer, Brittni reached one of the lowest points in her life. Broke and deep in depression she witnessed her boyfriend, a gang member, stabbed to death by a rival gang.
This incident left Brittni afraid for her life and drove her to attempt to take her own. In 2010, the California native snorted large amounts of crystal meth while in her bedroom with the lights off. She even began slitting her wrists multiple times, but Brittni says in that moment she heard a voice say, ‘Turn the lights on and put the scissors down’.
A verse in the Bible, Revelation 2:20, triggered a life change for Brittni in 2012. When she read this part of the Holy Book, she says she had her ‘light bulb moment’ to turn to God and quit porn
She attributes the voice to God and says the words dissuaded her from taking her life.
‘Had God not spoken to me that evening, without a shadow of doubt, I would have taken my life that day.’
Brittni called her Christian grandparents in Santa Barbara that night. Her grandfather – who lived a two-hour drive away – took her to church and she says it was at this time she decided to commit her life fully to Jesus Christ.
Upon her return to Los Angeles, Brittni went back into porn because she says she was without the support of a Christian community and had entered the wrong crowd.
‘I didn’t go back to church when I went home,’ she said.
‘I went back into the industry because this guy, who turned out to be a pimp, came into my life and got me back into porn, where I stayed for three and a half years.’
But her ‘light bulb moment’ happened again while on a flight to shoot a porn scene. She read a Bible verse, Revelation 2:20, which preaches against promiscuity.
Speaking about that moment she said: ‘That was my lightbulb moment, I started to cry and I apologized to God. I didn’t understand that this is what I’ve been doing all these years.’
Brittni only had a check of $1500 left but still decided to break up her relationship with the pimp and to quit the industry – for good this time.
She took a job at a cab company earning $10 per hour, and became a regular at her local church, the Cornerstone Church of San Diego, where she has become a youth minister. In 2016, she married the church’s lead pastor, Richard de la Mora.
Brittni, who once craved nothing more than the approval from men, says she now only strives to be accepted by God. Her past is now a distant memory and she says she wants to keep it that way, although she plans to tell her children in the future.
‘I don’t worry about my past, I want to teach my children that we all have a past and we don’t judge because of it. We love them through it. I need to be the type of person that I want my children to be.’
Brittni (pictured left) worked for a cab company for $10/hr after she quit porn. Not long after her revelation, she became a member of the Cornerstone Church in San Diego, California, where she fell in love with the lead pastor, Richard de la Mora (pictured right, holding a microphone). The two married in 2016 and often preach about their Christian faith together
The porn star who once craved nothing more than the approval from men has transformed into a Youth Minister who strives for God’s approval. Although she has moved on, she plans to tell her children about her past. She said: ‘I don’t worry about my past I want to teach my children that we all have a past and we don’t judge because of it. We love them through it. I need to be the type of person that I want my children to be.
Bree Solstad, known previously as a star and “creator” of the pornography industry, has undergone a radical transformation and become a Catholic. Her Baptism took place at this year’s Easter Vigil, marking a significant milestone in her spiritual journey, Solstad, who was usually recognized on the X platform (previously Twitter) as “Miss B Converted,” announced her conversion on January 1, 2024, leaving her previous life behind and giving herself completely to her newly discovered faith. “I cried with great joy after receiving the Body and Blood of Jesus for the first time,” said Solstad to The Daily Signal, expressing the profound impact of this moment on her life. After a decade in the pornography industry, both as actress and as a producer, Solstad decided to leave her sinful past, wealth and self-destruction behind. Her decision wasn’t easy and, as she predicted, she faced criticisms and ridicule from some of the online community. However, her determination to follow Christ and leave her former life behind remained firm. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal, she shared the details of her trajectory and journey of faith.
After a childhood in which she was active in the Lutheran Church, she left the faith during her university years, submerging herself in a lifestyle of excess and libertinage. However, a series of transforming experiences, including a visit to Italy and her encounter with sacred art, led her to question her way and look for meaning in her life. The Virgin Mary’s figure, omnipresent in the streets and places of worship she visited in Italy, impacted her profoundly and led her to a path of spiritual redemption and renewal. After returning home, she confronted the emptiness of her former existence and sought spiritual guidance, which finally led her to embrace the Catholic faith wholeheartedly. Reactions to her conversion have been mixed, but Solstad finds consolation and strength in her new relationship with God. Instead of producing contents for adults, she is dedicated to the creation of unique rosaries and Christian jewels, symbolizing her spiritual rebirth and her commitment to a life of virtue and service. Her story has had a profound effect on others, with several former colleagues of the entertainment industry for adults approaching her in search of guidance and support. Solstad hopes that her witness will inspire others to seek the light in the midst of darkness and to find peace and redemption in faith.
In a world that often seems to be dominated by superficiality and hedonism, Bree Solstad’s story is a powerful reminder of the capacity of divine love to transform even the most lost and desperate lives into a story of hope and redemption.
By the turn of the twentieth century, African American poets and other Negro artists were met with enormous cultural and racial barriers that threatened to compartmentalize them into an insipid group whose successes were measured by how effectively they could copy white people. Consequentially, James Weldon Johnson noted in 1921 that the Aframerican poets must create a “new and distinct form of expression,” unique to them (Mays 1050), characterized by truthful writing about the Negro life. This paper would argue that a comparison of the historical-cultural background, structure, figurative devices, and imagery of Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” and Claude McKay’s “Harlem Shadows” would reveal that both poets, though differing in style, nevertheless satisfy the need that Johnson expressed in their own unique way.
To begin, the two poems were published at different times. Hughes’ “Harlem” is part of his collection of poems called “Montage of Dream Differed,” published in 1951 (Little), a period marked by civil unrest and activism against racial injustice in America. In line 1, Hughes asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” and then suggests a series of possible answers in an attempt to understand the nature of the oppressive racism deferring the legitimate aspirations for freedom and equality of millions of African American Negros. On the other hand, McKay’s “Harlem Shadows” was published in 1922 (Lannamann) during the Harlem Renaissance, when Negro poets and artists migrated to the Harlem area of New York City, fleeing the burden of stifling racism choking them in the rural South.
According to Mars, the two poets were major characters of the Harlem Renaissance, the period between the First World War and the beginning of the Great Depression in America. The author argues that the Harlem Renaissance was a culmination of historical social and cultural factors that converged within 10 years and brought many talented American Negros to Harlem, who, individually, rather than as a group, spurred Negro poetic and artistic growth and stirred up Negro consciousness to become part of the American story, leading to many original Negro works of art (1031). It is significant to note that the Renaissance was neither planned nor organized but erupted spontaneously, caused by the savage effects of slavery, racism, and oppression and by the migration of sharecropping Negroes from the rural South to the urban North, where the war had created a vacuum and job opportunities in factories for the Negros (Mays 1031). Consequently, some Negros who migrated experienced separation from their place of origin and cultural and religious uprooting. This fragmentation was keenly felt by the more vulnerable groups, such as girls. McKay paints the picture of the broken and hopeless girls, destitute and roaming the streets of Harlem, forced into prostitution by the cruelty of poverty and alienation (Graham 157).
For Hughes, the cultural uprooting created a shallow and pathetic desire among Negros to imitate white people, while economically prosperous Negros were proposed as cultural models for less developed Negros and White culture as the ultimate aspiration and respectability (Barnett 853). The new Negro Renaissance instead proposes that the Negro should be helped to grow their own distinctive voice. Thus, Hughes created a new voice of poetry by introducing the popular Negro folk blues and spirituals into literature and integrating poetry and jazz (Hughes 00:09:25) and pledged to express this new Negro spirit, beautiful or ugly, without fear or favor, regardless of who disapproves, as the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance (Shawn 89). Amiri Baraka notes that Hughes and McKay’s focus on the everyday, ordinary Negro was irksome to quite a few black critics who would have preferred them to celebrate and write about upwardly mobile Negros and those aspiring to move up the middle-class ladder (Hughes 00:10:55). Hence, while McKay’s poem examines the lives of real Negros, Hughes uses the metaphor (Barnett 845) of “deferred dream” to highlight the bitter frustrations of racism breaking the spirit of Negros. In lines 1–2, he compares a “dream deferred” to a succulent and sweet raisin that dries and shrivels when left out in the sun. It can be argued that for Hughes, the mark of a disenfranchised people is their inability to protect their dreams, but for McKay, it is their inability to protect their girls.
Interestingly, since there is no use of any personal pronoun in the poem, the speaker in Hughes’ “Harlem” is impersonal, thus widening the scope of the poem’s relevancy to all afflicted by oppression, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. . would later adopt Hughes’ “Dream” in his address at Lincoln Memorial Park in 1963 to a massive crowd protesting racial injustice (Eschner). Likewise, Lorraine Hansberry would draw the title of her play, “Raisin in the Sun,” about an indigent Negro family, from Hughes (Miller). In contrast, McKay uses the personal pronoun “I” in line 1: “I hear the halting footsteps of a lass,” and identifies with the subject’s black race in line 16, a significant hint that he is the speaker: “The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!”(16) “Ah, little dark girls who have slippery feet” (5).
Essentially, the two poems differ in their poetic form since “Harlem” is a free verse with a unique form, while “Harlem Shadows” is a formal verse with a strict rhyme scheme that is quite predictable (Lannamann). Structurally, “Harlem” has an unusually irregular line length, with the first stanza having 8 lines, the second 3 lines, and the third 1 line that is italicized. “Harlem Shadows,” on the other hand, has 18 lines and 3 stanzas with ABABCC rhyme schemes. In addition, “Harlem” utilizes assonances and end rhymes, for instance: lines 3/5: “sun/run,” lines 6/8: “meat/sweet,” and lines 10/11: “load/explode.”. Additionally, the poem opens and closes with single-line stanzas that mirror each other: “What happens to a dream differed?” “Or does it explode?” (Sharma 4).
Hence Sharma argues that the complicated structure of “Harlem” reflects the complicated and troubled life of the Negros in 1920 Harlem as well as in 1950 America (4) and that it is conceivable that Hughes is deliberately rebelling against the strict rhyme schemes that dominate White poetry by creating a dissonant theme similar to Negro Jazz and Blues. On the other hand, the regular predictability of McKay’s “Harlem shadows” perhaps suggests that he is familiar with prostitutes and feels comfortable talking about them (Winston 34) in an age (1920) when prostitution and discussion about prostitutes were very much muted in society and the very idea of a girl selling herself in prostitution was an unspeakable topic among polite company. Understanding the social environment at that time makes clear the significant impact and radical nature of Claude’s poetry and his belief that by constantly highlighting prostitution as well as its underlying cause (racism), he would eventually put an end to it.
Further differences between the two poems are in the symbols they employ. In “Harlem Shadows,” the main symbol is the “feet.”. McKay writes that they are “halting” in line 1, “slippered” in line 5, “grey” and “no know rest” in line 8, “weary, weary” in line 17, and “timid” in line 15, yet they go on prowling through the streets by night and never give up. He also declares that they are “sacred” in line 16, hence suggesting that their violation is sacrilegious. His juxtaposition of the mundane and the sacred further highlights the dire circumstances of these young girls. In contrast, the main symbol of Hughes’ “Harlem” is the “Dream,” which can be understood as an aspiration, a goal, or a desire for achievement. The speaker does not specify whose dream it is that is deferred, but it can safely be assumed, judging by the title of the poem, that it is that of the Negros of Harlem, yet it can equally validly represent everyone’s dream, aspirations, or goals.
Similarly, both poets employ different imagery to underscore the Negro quagmire. Sharma argues that the imagery used by Hughes helps readers understand that a deferred dream is an unpleasant and disgusting sight, like a festering sore or the painful sight of a heavy load sagging down a man’s shoulder. He also uses auditory imagery when he compares it to an explosion or a bomb, and he uses nasal imagery when he likens it to the unpleasant smell of rotten meat. In the same way, McKay uses the imagery of the veil in lines 2–3 to describe Harlem nights: “In Negro Harlem, when the night lets fall its veil,”. Just like a veil covers the face from the scrutiny of strangers, night covers the young prostitutes, shielding them from the scrutiny of other individuals or from themselves, and under the veil of the night, they can carry on with their shameful acts. He also describes the night as long and lonely, bringing to the reader’s mind the image of fatigue and exhaustion because “the little gray feet know no rest” (line 8). Furthermore, McKay, wishing to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that men who batter for sex with young girls have lost their humanity and are controlled by lust, employs personifying “desire” in line 4: “To bend and barter at desire’s call.”. He implies that a twofold process is taking place: the lusting men regard the girls as “objects” of pleasure, while the girls are only interested in the men’s money.
Moreover, McKay’s use of repetition of “street to street” to end each stanza and repetition of “feet” after every 5 lines of each stanza adds lyrical beauty to the poem but, more importantly, draws attention to the hopelessness and danger that these girls are exposed to wandering dark, cold streets at night. According to Lannamann, the repetition of “weary, weary feet” makes “feet” a symbol of desolation and calls to mind scurrying nocturnal creatures like rats and rodents, images of misery. In lines 13-14 apostrophe, his anguish overflows in a heart-rending cry: “Ah, stern harsh world, which in the wretched way” (13) “of poverty, dishonor, and disgrace.”(14) His diction or register is cleverly chosen to soften the reader’s hearts towards these young girls, as well as evoke a tender feeling usually reserved for children, while at the same time preserving the reader’s anger towards the unjust structures responsible for their plight.
Finally, McKay’s use of the “feet of clay” in line 15 is a biblical allusion to the Babylonian king who erected a mighty golden image of himself that had feet of clay and hence came crashing down when struck by a small stone pebble (New Jerusalem Bible Daniel 2:41). Perhaps he is warning that these oppressed girls (Negros) are the “feet of clay” that could bring down American society, no matter how powerful and strong it may look unless racism and oppression are rooted out and the Negros restored to full citizenship. Similarly, a shift occurs in line 11 of “Harlem,” as the speaker finally compares a “dream deferred” to a bomb that explodes in violence: Or does it explode? This is the only metaphor in the poem, and by putting this last line in italics, the speaker is perhaps hinting that the conclusion that he has reached is that a deferred dream ends in violence. He may also be alluding to the Harlem race riots that exploded in 1935 and 1943 (Little).
In conclusion, comparing the poems “Harlem” by Langston Hughes and “Harlem Shadows” by Claude McKay reveals that they are two of a kind, and though published nearly 30 years apart, they identify with the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that sought, through art and literature, to bring to light the oppressive and unjust forces bearing down on the broken shoulder and bowed head of the Negro and thus help bring these injustices out from the shadows to the full nakedness of light to end them. Furthermore, a comparison of the historical-cultural background, structure, figurative devices, and imagery of these two great poems reveals that their authors are, as James Weldon Johnson proposed, the voice of the new Negro, unashamed to speak of the everyday life of the ordinary Negros in a manner that truthfully delineates the full racial relations between blacks and whites and thus enables the necessary changes to be made by those who have the power to make them.
Works Cited
Barnett, S., et al., editors. An Introduction to Literature: Fiction, Poetry and Drama. 15th ed. Pearson/Longman, 2008.
Christian, Shawn Anthony. “We do not teach literature; we are taught by literature: Building African American literature during the new Negro Renaissance.” 2003. search.proquest.com/docview/287881000?accountid=188730. Accessed November 20, 2020.
Eschner, Kat. “How Langston Hughes’s Dreams Inspired MLK’s.” Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Feb 2017.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-langston-hughess-dreams-inspired-mlks-180961929/. Accessed on December 6, 2020.
Langston, Hughes: The Dream Keeper, in Voices & Visions. Bourne, S. C. (Director). [Video/DVD] search.proquest.com/docview/2062853600?accountid=188730. Accessed November 19, 2020.
Lannamann, Taylor. “Harlem Shadows.” LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, June 12, 2020. litcharts.com/poetry/claude-mckay/harlem-shadows. Accessed December 2, 2020.
Little, Margaree. “Harlem.” LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 6 Mar 2020. litcharts.com/poetry/langston-hughes/harlem. Accessed December 3, 2020.
Mays, Kelly J., The Norton Introduction to Literature: Shorter Twelfth Edition, Norton & Company, pp. 1031–40, 2015.
Miller, Jason, W. “Dream Deferred,” 2015, 10.5744/florida/9780813060446.003.0004.
The New Jerusalem Bible. Edited by Susan Jones, Doubleday, 1985.
Sharma, Lok, Raj. “Stylistic Analysis of Langston Hughes’s Poem ‘Harlem’”. International Journal for Research in Educational Studies (ISSN: 2208-2115), Vol. 4, No. 3, Apr. 2018, pp. 01–10, gnpublication.org/index.php/es/article/view/199. Accessed on November 27, 2020.
Graham, Craig Barnes. (2017). The “New York state of mind” of Claude McKay: A literary biography of a Caribbean writer’s contribution to the Harlem Renaissance and the creation of the New Negro, 2017. proquest.com/dissertations-theses/new-york-state-mind-claude-mckay-literary/docview/2047581111/se-2?accountid=188730. Accessed December 10, 2020.
Winston, James. “Becoming the people’s poet: Claude McKay’s Jamaican years, 1889–1912.” Small Axe, (13), 17, 2003.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/becoming-peoples-poet-claude-mckays-jamaican/docview/195797764/se-2?accountid=188730. Accessed December 9, 2020.
A close reading of Elizabeth Barret Browning’s 1891 poem titled, “How do I love thee?” reveals that it is also constant, boundless, and eternal. This paper would argue that Browning’s poem is a reckoning of the attributes of true love.
The poem, “How do I love thee is a petrachan sonnet made up of the traditional 14 lines divided into two sections of rhyming octave and sestet, with ABBA ABBA CDC DCD rhyming pattern, written in iambic pentameter (Houghton). The speaker of the poem is probably the poet, who is possibly responding to her lover’s demand for an account of her love for him. In the first line, the poet repeats the question, perhaps, startled and surprised that he doubts her love: “How do I love thee?”
Nevertheless, in the same line, she quickly recovers her composure and says to him, “Let me count the ways.” In line 2-3, she uses a metaphor and cascading polysyndeton with enjambment to declare her love as expansive and as boundless as her soul can reach: “To the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.” She continues, still in line 3, to assure him that her love is not fickle or dependent on proximity but remains undiminished even when he is far away: “when feeling out of sight”. According to Houghton, lines 3-4 use assonance of the long /e/ sound to emphasize the union of her soul with that of her lover: “My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight.” “ For the ends of being and ideal grace.”
Furthermore, in line 4, the poet makes a supernatural leap to the divine in an overflow of love that can no longer be contained, and her words take on a religious allusion when she declares that the end of every creature and every ideal is to be in the grace of God: “For the ends of being and ideal grace.” Similarly, in lines 5- 6, the poet uses enjambment and bright imagery to continue elaborating on her boundless love, insisting that her love meets the need of each day and it does not cease, “by sun or candlelight”, the sun and candle light symbolizing the extending of her love through night and day.
The poet repeats the phrase, “I love thee” at the beginning of lines 7, 8 and 9, this is an anaphora that demonstrates the intensity of her love. She also declares that she loves him freely “just as men freely strive for justice,” in other words, she loves him because it is the only right thing to do. “Even as men turn from praise,” means that she does not seek any personal gain by loving him, she is not after what she can get, but rather gives her love without any strings attached.
Subsequently, in line 9 there is a shift in her tone and her declarations of love take on a more personal and unhappy shade, she declares that she loves passionately and forever even when disappointed. Love always involves suffering and heartbreaks and the true test of love is to accept all the failures and imperfections of the beloved since, “Love bears all things, believes all things, and endures all things (New Jerusalem Bible 1Corinthians 13:7).”
Likewise, in line 11-12, she proclaims that just like some saints falter but are not discouraged, but rather continue to strive to love God, so too does she love. In lines 12-13 enjambment, she affirms that her love encompasses all the elements of her life such as her breath, her smile and her tears; no condition can alter her love. In the last line, she asserts that her love is eternal and forever because she would love him even more when she is dead. This is an allusion to the Christian belief of life after death: “and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”
In conclusion, Elizabath Barret Browning’s poem, “How do I love thee?” can be read as a tally of the intrinsic attributes of true love, since every true love needs the property of constancy that makes it dependable and strong, unaltered by the ravages of time. Furthermore, by its very nature, true love is an unlimited free gift of self to another and finally, true love is forever and eternal, undiminished by death.
Sadio Mane, a Senegalese soccer star, earns approximately $10.2 million annually. He gave the world a rude awakening after some fans were flabbergasted when they saw him carrying a cracked iPhone 11. His response was awesome:
“Why would I want ten Ferraris, 20 diamond watches, and two jet planes? I starved, I worked in the fields, played barefoot, and I didn’t go to school. Now I can help people. I prefer to build schools and give poor people food or clothing. I have built schools and a stadium and provided clothes, shoes, and food for people in extreme poverty. In addition, I give 70 euros per month to all people from a very poor Senegalese region to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips, or even planes. I prefer that my people receive some of what life has given me.”
Did you know that: 166,324 people die daily, 6,930 people die every hour, 116 people die every minute, and 1.93 people die every second?
Yet, most people are afraid to consider their own death out of fear. In this episode of Authorschoice Online, we will consider the four last things that will happen to everyone, beginning with death.
Death, according to Christian teaching, is the separation of the soul from the body. The soul, being spiritual, cannot die (i.e., it is immortal), but it is also self-reflective, aware, and knows. It also possesses the ability to move from one place to another, passing through walls and things like that. More importantly, as soon as we die, God grants our soul light to see with perfect clarity the good or evil aspects of the choices we have made throughout our lives up until the moment before our death. Death makes these choices permanent, and the soul adheres to these choices and can neither change nor repent any longer. Thus, the soul of the dead perseveres in choosing or rejecting God forever. Death irrevocably fixes the good or evil we have chosen in life, and we cannot change it. Put another way, death is the end of the testing process; what remains is either reward or punishment. God immediately judges and rewards the good soul with heaven and judges and punishes the evil soul with hell. If the soul is in a state of grace with some imperfections, it goes to purgatory for purification. This immediate judgment is the particular judgment, and it differs from the general judgment at the end of the world.
Immediately after death, the soul is Judged in the Particular Judgment
At the particular judgment, the soul of the dead appears immediately before God (even as the relatives are weeping or preparing the decomposing body for burial). God grants the soul light to see the choices made while alive. If it has chosen God (good), it rushes towards God, who is infinite love, beauty, happiness, joy, eternal blessedness, and the very source of all that is lovely. If it has chosen evil, it rushes away from God and towards hell: hatred, evil, misery, emptiness, and eternal separation from God. The truth of the particular judgment and the immediate retribution or punishment at the moment of death is borne out in sacred scripture by the words of Jesus on the cross to the good thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
Regarding the fittingness of immediate judgment after death, it is argued that, since a dead man cannot choose good or evil anymore, there is no reason to wait until the final judgment at the end of time to reward the just or punish the wicked. Besides, such a “waiting” or “delay” will only punish the just, keeping them in a state of permanent anxiety, not knowing their fate, while at the same time, it would be a reward for the damned soul whose punishment is put off for a very long time till the end of the world.
Purgatory
If the soul is imperfect, having no mortal sin but retaining imperfections, it goes to a place of purification we Catholics call purgatory. This is because, before a soul enters heaven, every trace of imperfection must be eliminated, and all attachment to sin or evil must be destroyed and purified.
Even though many people (primarily Protestants) contend that there is no purgatory because the Bible does not explicitly mention it and because we are fully prepared for heaven when we pass away because of our salvation through faith in Christ alone, the Church teaches that purgatory is in the Bible, even though it is not explicitly mentioned. The sense of purgatory is clear from the Old Testament, the second book of Maccabees, where Judas Maccabee took and gathered a collection of money for the sin offering for the souls of his dead men to be released from their sins. (Mac 12:39). In the New Testament, purgatory is even clearer. 1 Corinthians 3:10–15 talks about two fires: one fire to examine the good or evil of men’s deeds and another fire to purify them before they are saved. Experience tells us that there are different shades of perfection, and we all can grow in perfection. Thus, purgatory answers the question, “What happens to the soul of the imperfect who dies?”
This is why the Church offers the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass during the funeral and encourages all to offer suffrages for the souls in purgatory. The souls in purgatory, by nature of their state, can no longer merit graces for themselves and are wholly dependent on the people on earth to pray for them.
The pain of loss & pain of the senses
The souls in purgatory suffer two kinds of pain. The pain of loss consists of a certain delay in seeing God. The souls in purgatory no longer desire material things; they only have one consuming desire: to see God. Although that delay is painful, it differs greatly from the loss-related pain that the damned souls experience in that they have the satisfaction of knowing that it is only a temporary delay and that they will eventually see and join the love of God. In addition, there is the pain of sense that some call fire. This fire purifies them of their imperfections. This suffering is not a meritorious act because it is not performed freely but with compulsion. Yet, the souls in purgatory gladly accept this fire and impatiently await the end of their trials so that they can be with God. The duration and intensity of their suffering are dependent on the amount of suffrage we on earth offer them through our good acts and Eucharistic devotions. It is the duty of charity to pray for the souls in purgatory since they are our brothers and sisters. It is a requirement of justice since souls can be unduly detained because of our negligence, and finally, it is the obligation of piety that we owe members of our supernatural and natural families who might be in purgatory.
Hell
Truly, many do not understand what hell is; if they did, they would be anxious never to go there. Strictly speaking, the Catholic Church does not talk about those in hell because they are considered to be outside of the Church. They are no longer a part of the church. The souls of people who die in a state of opposition to God through attachment to evil go straight to hell. Hell is the ratification of the choices they freely made up until the moment of death. Death makes the opposition to God permanent and eternal. In Hell, the separation from the all-loving God is permanent, irrevocable, and without end. It is a life of complete frustration and emptiness. Hell is the opposite of love; it is hatred, darkness, and eternal punishment. It is eternally living with evil and knowing that it is forever, without end. Recalling that we are going to die and that there is an afterlife could help us keep focused.
Hell involves two kinds of pain. The pain of loss and the pain of sense
The pain of loss is the most intense and, in enormity, surpasses every other suffering imaginable because it is the loss of the ultimate end, happiness, and eternal bliss desired by every creature. The souls in hell experience intense remorse, not because of repentance from their sin but because of the enormity and eternal duration of their punishment. They also experience the pain of the senses, which some consider to be unquenchable fire, burning sulfur. Even if they do not know it, all men are created in the image of God to live with God forever. Every soul hungers for this union of love and happiness with God. To be eternally deprived of ever achieving this is the most terrible suffering a soul can have—a loss of all meaning and purpose and a permanent state of frightful misery
This pain of sense on the other hand is comparable to dying but never dying, hence the name “eternal death.” Apart from these two pains mentioned above, there are other pains, such as the suffering of being in the eternal company of the wicked and the damned, where all is misery and vile, the permanent company of the devil and all his demons, where hatred and evil are the only rules. We should truly pity those who do evil here on earth.
Heaven
The existence of heaven is explained in the same way that the existence of hell is explained. It is proper and fitting that those who die in the state of grace, without sin, and in union with God, having kept and obeyed his laws in this life be rewarded. That reward is the immediate and eternal possession of God who is love.
The metaphor of heaven as the dwelling place of God in the sky can be misleading, but through faith, we know that heaven is not a place but a living relationship with the Holy Trinity in Christ. The happiness of heaven is the enjoyment of all good, all love and beauty and bliss in God in a permanent eternal way without any fear of loss, forever. This eternal vision of God cannot be unless God grants the soul a light of glory that illuminates and unites with God. This light of glory called lumen Gloriae enables the creature to see and know God. Since love comes from knowledge, this act of seeing and knowing God is immediately followed by an intense love of God that produces immense joy, happiness bliss that nothing in this world can describe.
Thus, the soul participates in all the joy and happiness of the blessed. Moreover, it is in the blessed company of the saints, Mary, and all the blessed. It also knows all creatures through the mind of God. It is able to communicate with his loved ones on earth and rejoices as they progress towards heaven.
The final judgment
Unlike the particular judgment that comes immediately after death, the final judgment comes at the end of the world. It is the public ratification of the irrevocable sentence of the particular judgment. Moreover, is in keeping with the justice of God that just as many people do good without reward because no one sees them and many people do evil and are never caught, the final judgment will be the universal acclamation of hidden good-doers and universal condemnation of hidden evildoers.
It is also the time for the resurrection of the body. The same body that participated or even aided in the good or assisted in the evil done while on earth, will resurrect and re-unit with the soul for the universal judgment of body and soul. The final judgment will show that God’s justice prevails over all the injustices perpetrated by his creatures and that God’s love is stronger than death. Our hope does not look forward to the eternal life of the soul alone but to the eternal life of the whole human person, body, and soul. There is an eternal life of salvation, as a participation of the entire man in the glorious Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In addition, there is an eternal life of damnation, in which the separation from God becomes eternal.
Authors-choice: Hope & Revival 